I have never played Dungeons & Dragons. I had never heard of Gary Gygax until he died last week.
I write fantasy and I have never written a novel that was secretly a book version of my D&D campaigns. That’s because I never had any. What’s more none of my writer friends have ever done that either. Even those who do play D&D.
I do not dispute that Dungeons & Dragons has had a huge influence on role playing and video games. I’m less convinced of its impact on fantasy books. So unconvinced that the next person who claims that all fantasy writers—really? all?—are deeply influenced by Dugeons & Dragons gets violence committed upon their person by someone mean and cranky I will hire for the purpose.
It’s simply not true. Fantasy is a huge field. Vast and wide. I’ll buy that some High Fantasy has been influenced by D&D, but not anywhere near the scale of the J. R. R. Tolkien influence. That man made High Fantasy. I’ll even go as far to say that D&D is more influenced by Tolkien than High Fantasy is influenced by D&D.
I am not knocking D&D. Some of my best friends play it. I’d even let my sister marry a D&D player. But me? I’m not a role-playing kind of girl. I’m just saying that the people making these vast claims for D&D are the ones most influenced by it and perhaps don’t have sufficient perspective. There really are plenty of fantasy writers who’ve written books entirely outside the land of D&D. Oodles of them!
Not all fantasy writers are geeks.1 I even know a few non-geeky science fiction writers. Shocking, but true.
Manuel Ramos
Aaron A. Abeyta is a Colorado native and professor of English at Adams State College. For his collection, Colcha (University Press of Colorado, 2000), Abeyta received an American Book Award and the Colorado Book Award. Abeyta's other titles, both from Ghost Road Press, are a collection of poetry, As Orion Falls (2005) and a novel, Rise, Do Not Be Afraid (2007). Abeyta is also the recipient of a Colorado Council on the Arts fellowship for poetry. He lives in Southern Colorado where he can remain close to his family and culture, both of which greatly influence his work. Abeyta was born in 1971.
I recently met Aaron through the auspices of El Laboratorio, an exciting new literary project featuring several Colorado-based writers, and he agreed to answer a few questions for La Bloga. Now that I have read his novel I am even more pleased that I was able to do this interview. I think Aaron is a talented writer and that his voice is unique and adventurous: very much Southern Colorado (El Valle de San Luis, actually), and very much in touch with the passions of the Valley gente.
One reviewer of your novel said that the prose is "beautifully rendered" and that each chapter stands alone as a long poem. I agree about the beautiful prose. Do you think of your book as poetry? And I guess I am curious about why a poet would write a novel.
I never considered the book to be poetry, but I did make a very conscious effort to make the book image driven and lyrical, both of which are two of the building blocks of poems (and fiction too, at least the fiction I like to read). So, in that regard, I guess the book has qualities of poetry.
I think it’s a bit odd, however, that the reviewer stated that each chapter was a long poem; that was not my intent at all, but I can’t say that I was upset by those comments; I took it as a compliment.
As for why a poet would write a novel, that’s a very good question. I don’t really know, definitively that is. I do know that I sat down to write one day and it came out as prose (which is typically the way I begin all my poems, i.e. long hand, full margins, get all the ideas down and then go back and cut and cut). The difference this time was that I pretty much left the cuts out of it and went back the next day and wrote another chapter. All in all, I wrote a chapter each day and the novel actually wrote itself, sort of consuming my every thought. I literally dreamed about sequences and characters. I just followed the impulses that came to me. The reviewer mentioned that the village was the character; she alluded to Faulkner in this regard. It was the village of Santa Rita that got me writing in the first place. It is a real place that I loved as a kid; you can’t go there now without permission. The place is completely private and the road in is locked shut by an iron gate. When I saw the gate I knew what I wanted to write about, but the particulars seemed to somehow take care of themselves.
Another reviewer compared your novel, favorably, to Gabríel Garcia Márquez,noting that Santa Rita, the setting for your book, reminds one of Macondo, García Márquez's fictional Colombian town. I was taken by the elaborate levels of characterization, the creative imagery, and the non-linear approach to the narrative. Where did all this come from? In other words, what is the inspiration for your style of writing?
I learned early on, mostly from my abuelo, that a story is a living thing. I don’t ever remember hearing a story that began at A and ended at Z. I didn’t grow up with typical plot structures as a model. My mom didn’t read Mother Goose to me, or anything of the sort. I tell people that and they look at me like I was abused, as if to say that my parents not reading to me was some sort of 20th century crime. I never felt deprived, however. Everyone around me told great stories, and those were my bedtime stories. For example, my abuelito would tell a story and then a few weeks later I would hear the same story from the sheepherder and they were remarkably different, yet essentially the same. The teller of the story was always the heart, the information the blood and the listener the soul. I try and remain true to this model, not only in the novel but in all my writing. I guess my people were born of circles because that’s the way we still communicate.
As for the imagery and characterization, the imagery has always been a matter of paying attention to things around me, little things. I specifically look for things that most people wouldn’t notice and make a mental note to somehow use that somewhere in my writing. The characters, many of them, were based on real people, but a lot of them were dreamt or hybrids of classical literary figures and real people. For example, and I hope I don’t tip my hand too much with this, Nomio is based on some very real people in my life, but the name Nomios is another name for Hermes. Apollonio is Apollo, but he is also human in that some of his characteristics are based on people I grew up around. All in all, every name, well most of them anyway, are allusions to real, literary, religious or historical figures. The names were my way of developing characters that were already familiar but without making them too obvious; they were also a way of paying tribute to all of my influences. Sorry for the long answer. I got carried away.
I think the novel is complicated in the sense that the layers of characterization and interwoven stories require a reader's undivided attention and a commitment to pay attention to the details. This is not a criticism. I think your cast of characters at the beginning of the novel hints that you may agree with me. Do you?
The cast of characters at the beginning was not really my idea, per se. My publishers wanted a family tree, like the one that Gabriel García Márquez used at the beginning of 100 Years of Solitude. The problem, however, was that the characters weren’t from the same family. There would have been about 6 or 7 family trees. As a compromise we decided on the cast of characters option. If it would have been up to me, and in the end I guess it was, I think I would have left the character list out, but since the names of the characters are very traditional and therefore not common we (the publishers and myself) agreed that we should provide some sort of assistance to the reader. I know that one reviewer took exception with this and even hinted at there being too many characters for such a “thin” book.
To answer your question though, I really did want the book to be accessible on a lot of levels. I wanted each story to stand on its own but also to be part of a bigger whole. I wanted allusion to play a major role in the book, but I didn’t want the reader to feel obligated to look everything up. Therefore, yes, I suppose the book is complicated, but I would also hope that on the most basic level it is also as simple as listening to a story being told.
________________________
Aaron's website is www.aaronabeyta.com. He wanted me to make sure folks know that his books can be found at bookstores, through Ghost Road Press, and at online outlets such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Thank you, Aaron.
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Abiquiú Studio Tour
There’s a nice article (Georgia On Their Minds) in Lexus Magazine (yes, that Lexus) about the annual Abiquiú Studio Tour, a unique art festival in the heart of New Mexico. Each October for the past 13 years the collective of more than 60 artists opens its work spaces and homes to visitors who are bound to be charmed by the wide-ranging vision and diverse mix of painting, etching, sculpture, weaving, and many other formats. Included in the article are short interviews with several of the artists such as Leopoldo Garcia, described as “a ponytailed Vietnam veteran with a linebacker’s build and a voice that rasps and burbles like a cabin-cruiser at low tide,” and Barbara Manzanares, a weaver who says that her mother always told her “if you learn to weave you’ll never be hungry.” October is one of the best months to spend time in New Mexico and this festival sounds like a perfect way to spend that time. Abiquiú and the Ghost Ranch are indelibly linked to Georgia O’Keeffe as the places where she found inspiration and solace. You can read more by jumping to this link.
José Latour on Selling Culture
The International Association of Crime Writers’ website now offers articles by members. Included in the lineup is an article by José Latour, entitled The Influence of Promotion on the Entertainment and Cultural Markets. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article:
“Ninety- and one-hundred-year-old copies of newspapers and magazines from the U.S., France and Spain prove that books were reviewed frequently, but publicity and advertising were almost nonexistent. Until the 1910s, perhaps the 1920s, the number of copies a book sold and the attendance at cultural events were mostly the result of reviews and word of mouth. Most publishers saw themselves as purveyors of culture; they didn't want to lose money, but making money was not their raison d'être. Bookselling was considered a very dignified way of making a living.
“A hundred years later books are merchandise in the marketplace. In fiction and non-fiction alike, publicity and advertising are determinant. In mass-market fiction, promotion is indispensable. The big chain stores have a single purpose: to make money. Independent publishers and booksellers, among whom, it seems, many idealists continue to exist, also depend on good- and best-sellers to survive.”
The entire article is here.
Rocky Mountain Book and Paper Fair
The 23d Annual Rocky Mountain Book and Paper Fair will be held at the Merchandise Mart in Denver on August 3 and 4. Over 75 dealers will have on hand “an outstanding collection of books and vintage ephemera for sale” including maps, art and photographs. The press release notes that some of the items on display or for sale include first editions of John C. Fremont’s report of his first three expeditions and his role in the conquest of California (sounds like right up your alley, Sol); L. Frank Baum’s Glinda of Oz; John Arrowsmith’s map of the Republic of Texas, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men; and Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Get many more details here.
Later.
I think it made *many* fantasy readers, which boosted the genre.
I often say I majored in journalism and minored in D&D at university, but it didn’t influence my fantasy writing: in fact, what I found was that I preferred being the DM (Dungeon Master)to playing the game because I kept trying to massage the campaign into some kind of coherent story.
I quit playing partly because I had no one to play with (*sniff*) but also because one day I looked at the several hundred pages of background material I had created for the game (we never played published modules; modules were for sissies!) and thought, “You know, I could have used all that creative effort on writing a couple of books.”
So, loved the game, but major influence on fantasy? I seriously doubt it. Tolkien still rules the roost there.
Hmm. I think you are a role-playing girl. It’s just that, like most writers, you do your role-playing on the page when you’re writing a story. Or at least, that’s how I feel some days.
I gotta agree, Tolkien has influenced much more than D&D, and I have a close friend whose whole family agree with me. And you know what? Some of my favorite books are so obviously based off of Tolkein, but that doesn’t matter, cuz Tolkein RULES!
Oh, and I just found a rweally funny title: The Agony and the Ecstasy…In Your Pants. Tell me that does not make you giggle!
I think it needs to be clarified that D&D had a profound influence on HIGH fantasy/EPIC fantasy. That whole Tolkienesque subgenre. Which you, Justine, don’t write. I haven’t really encountered too many people saying “all fantasy owes tons to D&D.”
(Granted, I haven’t been reading every single piece on Gycax’s death. I was a high-fantasy-novel geek, and never heard of him before last week. I do think he has achieved the best kind of influence, though — profound, but private. And, uh, lucrative. And this adorable tribute.)
Perhaps it’s that a lot of the media at large don’t quite realize that fantasy has subgenres, or that fantasy equals fantastic/non-mimetic elements of all kinds, which would include practitioners like Poe and Twain and Mary Shelly and Alexander Pope, and is not the exclusive domain of bands of multispecies medieval adventurers on a Quest for a Talisman to Save The World.
oh, thank goodness. i was starting to worry that i would have my fantasy/sf/geekiness card removed for not even having *heard* of d&d when i was the appropriate age to start doing that. too busy reading tolkien, i imagine.
I’d say that D&D brought more readers to fantasy, considering how it brought a lot more men into reading books (perhaps even making it a bit more socially acceptable[though mostly for the geeky subcultures in high school]), but I agree that Tolkien is the man of high fantasy, not Gygax.
The few campaigns I played were never novel worthy, anyway. No matter how cool it was that my husband set an entire village of evil frog/bears on fire, it’s not that easy to throw it into a book, and have wholescale destruction be completely funny.
Gina has it exactly right–sure, Tolkien made high fantasy, but D&D surely did create a ton of fantasy readers–people who might have have picked up those Tolkien books if not for D&D. (And of course, Tolkien obviously greatly influenced D&D.)
And I would disagree that some SF/fantasy writers you know are not geeks. I think that being an SF/fantasy writer automatically makes you a geek–an Alpha geek, in fact, if that flowchart floating around the intarwebs is to be believed. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a geek–I’m one and proud of it–it’s just that I think writing an SF/fantasy novel is just a pretty geeky thing to do, no matter how cool you are. I mean, China Mieville? He’s pretty cool, right? But he’s certainly a geek (he’d even tell you so himself).
Hmm. Never played D&D either. I guess I’d try it, I just haven’t had a chance, and I don’t really know anyone who plays. I’ve also never read *gasp* Lord of the Rings. Eh. I guess I don’t like High Fantasy as much as… mild fantasy? Whatever you call it.
Gina Black: I think it made *many* fantasy readers, which boosted the genre.
That I can agree with, especially boys.
Karen: I think you are a role-playing girl. It’s just that, like most writers, you do your role-playing on the page when you’re writing a story.
I disagree. Role-playing implies that you are playing the role of your characters. Which I do not do. I never feel like I am any of my characters. Writing—for me anyway—is very distant from acting.
John Joseph Adams: I think that being an SF/fantasy writer automatically makes you a geek–an Alpha geek, in fact, if that flowchart floating around the intarwebs is to be believed.
And I think that definition of geek makes the word meaningless. I’ve seen that chart and I don’t share any of its preoccupation and haven’t done any of those activities except writing fantasy.
Many of my friends are geeks. Hell, I even married one. But I am not a geek.
We can all agree that you are not a geek, Justine. Certainly not with those boots!
But Patrick that implies that geeks don’t know great boots when they seem them. I know many well-dressed geeks.
I wonder how many fantasy readers who started in D&D ever realize to what extend Gygax was stealing with both hands from pre-existing literature.
I don’t mean just Tolkien (and Moorcock, and Lovecraft), but things like Vance’s Dying Earth, which shows up all over the place in the first-edition books.
How do you define a geek, then? (Don’t mean to be quarrelsome, just curious.)
John Joseph Adams: Geeks have a fanatic engagement with technology—especially computers. Also with science fiction in all its forms. There’s war gaming geeks and D&D geeks etc. etc. But basically it’s an intense engagement with a specific set of interests.
I have neither the intense engagement nor more than a passing interest in most of the particularly geeky subject areas.
I stand corrected. So many writers; so many processes.
Karen: You is not corrected. As you say there are many different processes. I can only speak for me. Especially as I just recently found out that many writers don’t wear hats when they write. How crazy is that? How on earth do they concentrate?
Hmm. The definitions I’m familiar with are broader than that I think.
“Geek” used to be more negative — in the 80s (U.S.), a geek was someone who severely lacked cool but wasn’t book-smart enough to be a “nerd.”
But now you can “geek out” over just about anything. I think it depends on the ability to recite long strings of esoteric facts that have nothing to do with your career. E.G.: I know many a “Buffy geek” who knows jack-all about computers. (I’d be a Buffy geek, I love it that much, but I don’t rewatch and I don’t know enough to refer to episodes by their titles, or what exact milestone took place in what episode or what other, later episode had a callback to aforesaid milestone. I’d need reference materials.)
I’m considered “geeky” by some because I’ll apply intensive lit-crit criticism to a comic book or to “Supernatural,” or to Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.
Okay, I reread Justine’s comment and there’s more overlap there than I thought. Sorry.
This part of your definition: “But basically it’s an intense engagement with a specific set of interests.” is 100% on point, I think, and is really the true definition of a geek. The sentence preceding that, however, I think is not–those are just types of geeks; not all geeks are enamored with technology, computers, etc.
You don’t have an “intense engagement” with fantasy literature? Your wrote a couple scholarly books on it. That seems pretty intense. Fantasy is “particularly geeky” subject area.
But, hey, if you don’t want to call yourself a geek, I’m fine with that. I was just trying to understand where you were coming from.
BTW, I didn’t mean to imply earlier that I drink that flowchart’s Kool Aid–it’s just a bit of silliness and most of it is just played for laughs. I guess I just agree with it that writing an SF/fantasy novel seems like the ultimate act of geekiness.
No, I really don’t have an intense engagement with science fiction. Probably because I wrote a book about it. I couldn’t even tell you the last sf book I read. Can’t stand the stuff.
If you start calling everyone a geek who likes something then the word becomes meaningless. It really has to be a passionate engagement to qualify. And “geek” in the way it gets used without a qualifier means technology and science fiction-y things. You don’t call someone obsessed with horses a geek, you call them a horse geek.
And calling a fantasy writer a geek because they write fantasy is absurd. It’s a professional engagement. It’s a job. Are lawyers therefore law geeks? I would some of them are, but many of them aren’t. A geeky engagement is different to a professional engagement. The two can co-exist but they are not the same.
Clearly you missed the memo that only Raymond Feist’s fiction actually counts as fantasy.
David: There appear to be a lot of memos I’ve missed.
Well-dressed geek is just a geek in diguise.
You said: “No, I really don’t have an intense engagement with science fiction. Probably because I wrote a book about it. I couldn’t even tell you the last sf book I read. Can’t stand the stuff.”
I didn’t say SF, I said “fantasy literature.” I thought that since you wrote fantasy, that would qualify as an intense engagement. I thought that if you did not have such an engagement with fantasy literature that you would probably write something else.
You said: “If you start calling everyone a geek who likes something then the word becomes meaningless. It really has to be a passionate engagement to qualify.” I agreed with you that it has to be a passionate engagement.
You said: “And “geek” in the way it gets used without a qualifier means technology and science fiction-y things. You don’t call someone obsessed with horses a geek, you call them a horse geek.” Sorry, I didn’t realize we were defining the standalone use of the word “geek.” I was thinking of it as something that you would pair up with a defining adjective. It sounded to me like you were denying any kind of “geekdom” not just that you were not a computer-loving, SF-loving type of geek.
You said: “And calling a fantasy writer a geek because they write fantasy is absurd. It’s a professional engagement. It’s a job.” So you’re saying, then, that you only write fantasy as a job? You don’t love it?
Are you calling Justine a geek?
John: I’ve never written any scholarly books about fantasy literature. I wrote one about the science fiction community. And edited another about feminist science fiction.
Well, anyway, I’ll leave you alone now. If there was any question as to my geekhood, I think I proved it with all this debating on this topic.
John: Nothing wrong with being a geek.
Though debating is not only a geek thing!
“But basically it’s an intense engagement with a specific set of interests.”
so a jock obsessed with football is a geek?
say what?
oh i guess thats already been addresed… fine then
I think D&D had a profound influence on fantastic fiction. Just not the sort of fantastic fiction that you and I read.
D&D was a mashup of fantasy tropes: it had stuff from Tolkien, a magic system adapted from Jack Vance, elements of mythology and epic, and character types largely drawn from sword & sorcery.
There followed a sort of mashup fantasy fiction. Chiefly the Dragonlance books, of course, which were explicitly based on D&D, but plenty of others as well.
Weis & Hickman’s sales figures could probably knock us all into a cocked hat, assuming of course that you could find a cocked hat at Wizards of the Coast.
Dragonlance, based on one set of games, even spawned games of its own, plus video games and at least one feature film.
Before D&D, sword & sorcery was a viable genre. Now it’s all been sucked into the mashup game-fiction genre.
So D&D did, in fact, have a massive influence on fantastic fiction, though since it generated its own audience outside of the traditional F&SF audience, we haven’t noticed it quite so much. It’s an enormous revenue-generating machine in the middle of the room, creating an enormous amount of noise and light, but we polite bystanders are trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Ah, this debate. I remember it well. Justine is not a geek. She is more… an anthropologist of geekdom that has soaked up some native customs, married into the tribe, etc. I think that’s what we decided, three mojitos in.
I am a well-dressed geek, but I’ve never played D&D and don’t really understand it. Also, my only interaction with “High Fantasy” outside of Tolkien’s LOTR and The Hobbit (Does Pullman and Lewis count?) is in the movies, which are always tolkien rip offs. that, and Tairen Soul, which I love.
I read more high fantasy masquerading as science fiction (or vice versa — how would one classify Dune?)
Also, I think that saying all fantasy writers owe a debt to Gygax is valid, because his creation helped the fantasy market, just like all YA writers owe a debt to Rowling, whether or not they write fantasy. However, just as I don’t think that “to be a YA writer is to consider writing a vampire novel” as one journo recently put it, I don’t think being a fantasy writer is being deeply influenced by Gygax. I am a Ya fantasy writer who is neither influenced by D&D or has ever considered writing about vampires.
Diana = WoW player = Geek
i would not marry a D&D player…
but I could marry a geek..
One other thought on this. D&D did have an influence on much the field, it’s just at some multiple number of removes. Without the success of D&D the whole role-playing game world would have been very different and possibly it would not have happened at all or happened much later.
That in turn would have changed the online and computer gaming world significantly. An awful lot of readers and writers have come to speculative fiction through the many games that owe a powerful debt to Gygax and D&D. To ignore that secondary influence on the genre is to miss much if not most of the impact of D&D.
Never claimed not to be, Pat. Though I only play with my husband, and I don’t play very often. I think it’s more like the wives who watch football b/c their husbands do.
Late to the party so just a few thoughts:
Justine: Instead of mean and cranky henchmen to cause bodily harm, you should really invest in henchment who enjoy the henching - makes them so much more effective…
On Geekdoms: I always felt the defnition of Geek requires both a devotion to some thing or interest that requires a practiced or acquired skill or knowledge, coupled with a nonconformity that places the person at least somewhat or in some way outside the mainstream social acceptance.
Therefore, anyone can really be a geek if they devote significant energies toward something the mainstream would find not worthy of the kind of energies or devotion the geek chooses to devote.
On D&D: Coming from sleepy suburban America in the late 1980s through very early 1990s, we weren’t allowed to play D&D (or hang with those who did) becuase it was satan’s board game ;}
Final Thought: being devoted to a geek-like undertsanding of Buffy is not, by definition, geeky, becuase the devotion is well-deserved and ethereal. :}
Emily
Gina Black hit the nail on the head. D&D and the whole RPG underground was/is a very synergystic meme, which via the Mensa and PC-boom vectors helped expand a multi-media Fantasy market through the 1980s and early ’90s. That market not only included/generated books, comics,and games,but also cult films, and tv-shows, which in turn inspired writers and fans-to-become writers alike.
Without an increasing readership, publishers buy fewer books. So the literary fantasy boom of the 80s and 90s (featuring a preponderance of newer female writers and fan-fic vets) fed off the fandoms created by fantasy gaming and the books which alternately inspire or were inspired by such games.
Laurell Hamilton (whose books contain plot elements and pacing reminiscent of both RPGs and video gaming) admits to her early D&D addiction as a useful precursor to writing novels. So do many of the script writers for various Star Trek spin-off series.